1814 How to Get Unstuck in Life

Do you ever feel like nothing you do seems to get you any closer to that big dream of yours? Do you ever feel like you’re always struggling but can’t seem to make any headway? Today we’re talking about how to get unstuck in life or business when nothing seems to be working the way you want it to.

7 Strategies to Help You Get Unstuck

Now, this feeling of “stuckness” is something that we all struggle with at various points along our paths, and it can leave you feeling completely frustrated, and utterly defeated. It can make you feel like you should give up on your goals because you start to think that maybe you’re never going to make it.

And I don’t want you to feel that way, so today I’m going to give you some insight on what might be happening if you’re in this situation, and I’m going to give you seven strategies for getting unstuck, and getting yourself back on track to building those dreams of yours.

Strategy #1: Zoom Out

Sometimes we get so caught up in what we’re dealing with that it’s hard to see anything outside of the immediate problem. Because we’re inside the problem, we can’t see a way out. Think of this like being trapped inside a maze – you can’t see the pattern because the walls around you are too high. But if you could zoom up, you could see all the twists and turns and find the way out far more easily.

To do this, you need to distance yourself, temporarily, from the immediate emotional charge (so the fear, the panic, the despair) of the situation so that you can think about it with a clear head. Try meditating or going for a brisk walk to clear your mind and then see if you can focus on solutions more easily.

Strategy #2: Forget the Past

Forget everything that came before. Oftentimes we feel stuck because we’re afraid that we’re going to repeat a bad experience or recreate a past mistake or fail again because we’ve failed so often in the past that we start to think it’s just who we are.

We associate our Selves with what we perceive to be our past inadequacies, so we end up doing nothing so that we can avoid the potential compounding of those awful feelings. But dwelling on the past like this only serves to mess up both our present and our future. We need to let all that stuff go if we want to start moving forward again.

So ask yourself this: If you had woken up this morning with amnesia – if you knew nothing about your past or anything that came before today, what would you do? How would you assess the situation you currently find yourself in, and what would your next steps be?

Strategy #3: Change the Story

If you were the main character in a book and your life was a fiction novel, what would you hope the character would do next? How would you want her to respond to the current situation, what would you want her to learn, and what skills or capabilities would you hope she develops while dealing with it?

Alternatively, you can try this thought experiment: If you could wave a magic wand and have everything be exactly the way you wanted it to be, what would your ideal resolution to this situation look like? Really take the time to focus on the details and, more importantly, the feeling of your ideal solution.

Either way, if you take just five to ten minutes every day to connect with this energy of your ideal solution or story line, it will help you find a way through the current situation.

Strategy #4: Change Your Programming

Over time, we all fall into certain patterns of behaviour. When faced with certain types of situations, we tend to react in certain predictable ways. This is normal, it’s something everyone does, and usually these automated programs actually help us in life by freeing up our brains to focus on other things. That’s what automation is always for – freeing up time and resources.

But when we’re feeling stuck, it’s sometimes because those patterns or scripts that we’ve been running aren’t helpful anymore. The environment in which the programs are being run has changed, but the scripts themselves never got updated to reflect that. So they’ve stopped performing a useful function and they’re now messing things up, as buggy programs always do.

In this case, being stuck is less about the situation than it is about the way we’re habitually respondingto that situation. So if we put a stop to the automated programming and really take an objective look at the situation we’re dealing with we can often find new solutions that we would have overlooked or never even noticed before.

Strategy #5: Pause and Regroup

Sometimes the best thing to do when you’re finding that nothing you’re doing is working the way you want it to is to deliberately take the time to pause and regroup. The pace of life today is faster than it has ever been, and it’s so easy to get stuck on a treadmill of frantic action and to always be running around doing things, because that’s just what we always do.

But action for the sake of action is often a smokescreen or maladaptive coping technique to help us avoid taking the time to sit down and really think about our lives and what’s really important to us. When we’re always rushing, we completely lose track of that inner compass that always points us in the right direction. And so we lose our way.

Make it a point to schedule some “me time” where you can slow down and find some stillness and silence in which to think about what’s happening in your life right now, reconnect with the touchstones at the centre of your Self, and recharge your metaphorical batteries.

Strategy #6: Get Focused

If you constantly feel like you’re scrambling, trying to stay on top of everything, but at the same time you’re just not seeing the results you want, you’re probably dealing with a lack of focus.

When your energy is scattered and you’re trying to be everywhere and do everything all at once, you’re not likely to get the results you want in any of the areas you’re frantically trying to make headway with. What you need to do in this situation is get focused. Think sunbeam shining on a piece of paper and warming it up versus sunbeam focused to a point through a magnifying glass and making it burst into flames.

So pick one thing to concentrate all your action-power on, give yourself a deadline for it (two weeks, for instance) and then dedicate yourself completely to that one thing until it’s done. Then, and only then, move on to the next thing.

Strategy #7: Flow with the Feeling

Finally, the last strategy I have for you today is to change the way you think about being stuck. I know it’s an awful feeling to be immersed in, but sometimes feeling stuck is just part of the process. Sometimes it’s actually a precursor stage to something else – to the next stage of your journey.

What I’ve found is that this feeling of being stuck always seems more pronounced when we’re on the verge of big changes, even though we’re not usually aware at the time that these changes are coming. And what happens is that when changes are in the works, but not yet obvious, we have this almost overwhelming feeling that “something needs to be done” but we just don’t have any clear sense of what it is that we can actually do.

So that frustrating, uncomfortable feeling is kind of like a sixth sense that tells us energy is shifting around us and it makes us feel restless and unsettled. And really the only way to deal with it is to be patient with yourself and use this “percolating time”, as I like to call it, to do things like take walks, journal, meditate, colour, or whatever else it is that helps you relax and get your thoughts flowing.